In this episode of Path to Growth, Tracy Young speaks with Rose Punkunus, founder and CEO of Sudozi, about her career journey from data and finance roles at major tech companies to founding a startup solving procurement and spend visibility challenges. Rose begins by sharing her early life story, having emigrated from Shanghai to the United States at age three. Her childhood was marked by frequent moves as her father pursued a new medical career in pathology, taking the family from Rochester to Atlanta to West Virginia, and ultimately to Long Island. Growing up in diverse communities shaped her appetite for learning and adaptability—traits that would serve her well in the tech industry. Much of the conversation focuses on Rose’s years at Uber, where she led global pricing and later served as CFO for the U.S. and Canada business during a period of rapid expansion. She explains the difficulty of pricing a two-sided marketplace, particularly when dealing with different rider expectations, driver incentives, and constantly changing local dynamics. She was responsible for building Uber’s finance data science team and bringing machine learning models into revenue forecasting—efforts that helped turn city-level data into executive-ready financial projections. This experience was pivotal in planting the seeds for her future company. After Uber, Rose joined other startups in senior finance roles, where she repeatedly encountered the same problem: a lack of visibility and coordination around vendor spend. Procurement decisions were often made in isolation, and finance teams were left reacting to invoices without understanding the context or timing. These experiences led Rose to found Sudozi, a platform that helps teams orchestrate procurement workflows, manage vendor relationships, and gain clarity on spend before it happens. She envisions Sudozi evolving into a system where not only procurement decisions are centralized, but payments and forecasts are integrated with context at the core. As a leader, Rose emphasizes the importance of open communication and clarity. She believes culture is best observed in how people behave when the CEO isn’t in the room. For her, communication, respect, and shared purpose are non-negotiable foundations for building a team. She also sees her job as clearing roadblocks and bringing in external context to inform the team’s decisions, while trusting her colleagues to own and execute. When asked about navigating difficult moments, Rose shares her approach to crisis management: taking a moment to process before reacting. She strives for a consistent and measured response, which helps her team feel safe sharing bad news as well as good. Once grounded, she quickly prioritizes next steps and focuses on forward motion. It’s a pragmatic mindset rooted in action and supported by calm. In a surprising detour, Rose reveals she once coached high school volleyball while working in the Bay Area. She describes coaching as one of her most formative leadership experiences, particularly because it involved mentoring young girls as they developed not just athletically, but also emotionally and socially. Those lessons in empathy, communication, and confidence continue to influence how she leads today. Looking ahead, Rose sees tremendous potential in procurement orchestration as a new category. She believes Sudozi is well-positioned to offer not just oversight of procurement workflows, but also direct payment capabilities and more accurate budget forecasting. By centralizing decision-making and contextualizing spend, she hopes to transform how companies manage financial operations. Rose concludes the conversation with advice for early-career professionals: take more risks. The start of a career is the lowest-cost time to explore, pivot, and experiment. She cred...
